Here's an example from this week. The first paragraph of a review of 'Tyson' which reads:
FOR those of us who grew up watching Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson was always a disappointment. No matter how many boxing titles he won – and few have won more – he always seemed like a brutal thug, a street fighter rather than a graceful athlete. One of the surprises of James Toback's film about Tyson is that he comes across as much smarter than he looks. Then again, a man who has lost every dollar he ever won – somewhere north of $US300 million ($370 million) – and done three years for rape is possibly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor the most likeable.
Just how wrong is that paragraph?
No.1 The comparison of Ali and Tyson is a hackneyed starting point, but to measure Tyson by the Ali yardstick and calling Tyson's career a 'disappointment' is sheer nonsense and arrogance. There are but a select few who can be the kinds of World Heavy Weight Champions both these men became. As boxers, their accomplishments are astounding no matter what they were like as people.
But No.2, the implied message is that Ali was a better man than Tyson - which may be true, but that is a moral point. It's not a point about their respective boxing styles or their significance as boxers in history, who made their mark.
No.3 We'll never know what a fight between Ali at his peak and Tyson at his peak might have been like. But Tyson was no thug. If Ali was flamboyant and artful, then Tyson was machine like, relentlessly precise and sharp. He was most certainly not a thug of a fighter.
No.4 Even if Tyson were a thug of a fighter, he won a lot. So clearly how he won in his peak years it's not an aesthetic issue; trying to make it one is just sloppy reasoning. Such aestheticisation of the problem also leads to the kind of fascism that Paul Byrnes himself would complain about bitterly in other contexts.
But one would know all these things had one been paying attention in the 1980s. Mike Tyson the man was an enormous enigma behind the sensation of Mike Tyson the boxer. We all knew this. And even in the denouement of his career when he was reduced to a ear-biting circus freak show who just had naked aggression left, Tyson the man remained oblique and mysterious to his spectacular public persona.
We know he has a sense of humour. Only last night I watched him in the 'The Hangover' where he pokes fun at his own expense, doing the Phil Collins air drum roll like the Cadbury chocolate ad with the Gorilla. He's always had a very funny side, even at his menacing peak. So, even with the rape conviction the enigma of Tyson was that he was likeable in spite of all those moral transgressions. And if Byrnes didn't understand this about Mike Tyson, I really wonder if he watched a round of Mohammed Ali or Mike Tyson box at their peak. Really.
Is Tyson really the idiot bastard son of Muhammed Ali's legacy? This has been asked a lot by pundits and commentators alike, but if you are dealing strictly with Tyson the man, you have say he came at a particular time of history when all the promises about race relations seemed to have somehow gone awry. That the black man might not be allowed into the main stream of American cultural discourse.
When you watch Muhammed Ali in 'When We Were Kings', he seems to radiate with hope for the future of what will happen for the black population in America. It is as if he can see far enough ahead that a Barack Obama would come along and be POTUS.
Mike Tyson emerged in an era when all that promise was slowly being eroded in the Reagan-Bush years, the bitterness of which exploded with the Rodney King trial and riots as well as the racial politic of the OJ Simpson trial. In a sense, Tyson was the man who actually had to fight the damn battle for acceptance in its darkest hours, unlike Ali who bore the standard as the battle was announced. Yes, Ali is heroic, but Tyson is not the antithesis to Ali, any more than say, Reggie Jackson or Michael Jordan or Carl Lewis or Albert Belle or Michael Vick or Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter might be. Each and all of these athletes turned up at different points along the long road from 1960, and dare say laid the ground of acceptance.
Yet Paul Byrnes chooses to cast a blind eye to all of that, and wants to reduce it to a moral comparison, just to start talking about a film about Mike Tyson, the man. I for one don't need this kind of moralism masquerading as cultural critique. It's shallow, venal and crappy.
Paul Byrnes, you suck. And that is not a moral statement.
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